Ash Kelley

Like, what?

Now, the murder of Kitty Genovese was a tragic event that scarred the neighborhood that it happened in.

Yeah, of course.

But from an objective position, there was little about it that was, like, outrageously, like, out of the ordinary for, like, a horrible crime.

Unfortunately, yeah.

You know what I mean?

Like, it wasn't, it was horrible.

Yeah.

But it was, like, a horrible crime.

And had it not been for the news coverage that followed, it likely probably would have been one of those that we found and we're like, why didn't we know about this?

You know what I mean?

Like it would have got like totally obscured and other things.

In fact, in the week that followed Kitty's death, the murder made the paper a handful of times reporting basic facts.

Then came Martin Gansberg's now notorious New York Times article that changed the narrative entirely.

published on March 27, 1964, Gainsbourg's article, 37 Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police, ignored most of the facts of Kitty's murder and instead focused on a misunderstanding of the reactions from her neighbors.

He wrote, According to him, Kitty's neighbors not only heard her cries for help, but actively ignored them, knowing that she was being violently assaulted.

He said, if we had been called when he first attacked, the woman might not be dead now.

That's he had quoted a police chief as saying that.

It seems unlikely that Martin Ginsburg was acting like in bad faith when he wrote the article.

Instead, the article was assigned to him by an editor, Abe Rosenthal, who had been fed the misinformation by New York City Police Commissioner Michael Murphy.